Various instruments and events within a healthcare enterprise can generate alarms for notifying point-of-care staff such as nurses and physicians of events and conditions regarding patients. Electronic Medical Record systems maintain an increasing portion of patient related information, but generally operate in isolation from other electronic systems within the healthcare enterprise.
Notifications associated with alarms and other relevant clinical information generally are not automatically provided to the correct staff member. They are also generally not presented in the manner that most efficiently improves care provisioning and ultimately patient outcomes. These challenges are often complicated by patient turnover, changes in patient status, staff assignment updates, or staff modifications due to shift changes.
The enormous quantities of ever-shifting information regarding personnel, patients, and events within a healthcare facility complicate routing updates to the most proximate, available, or appropriately skilled staff member and presenting it in the most efficient manner. Traditionally, much of this information is managed and communicated using paper, clipboards, white boards, files, charts, fax machines, and other manual methods that are slow, inefficient, non-ubiquitous, and error-prone.
As more systems in the healthcare enterprise have become computerized and networked, electronic alarms have become more numerous and frequent. As clinicians become desensitized to frequent interruptions of these alarms, they often begin to ignore the alarms or even turn them off. This phenomenon is referred to as alarm fatigue.
There is a need in the art for healthcare enterprise notification technologies that can intelligently integrate, analyze, predict, and present a broad spectrum of information regarding personnel, patients, and events such that notifications and presented information improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.